with Sophia Siddique Harvey. Shirkers, vulnerability, and staying for the credits.

Sophia Siddique is a film scholar whose area of focus is contemporary Southeast Asian cinemas, film phenomenology, and genre (horror and science-fiction). She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film at Vassar College. Siddique lives with a lovable feline rascal, Magnus, who is her creative muse!

Sophia’s unfinished project is a film called Shirkers, which she created in the early 1990s alongside Sandi Tan and Jasmine Ng. She met Sandi and Jasmine while studying film at Substation, Singapore’s first independent contemporary arts centre.

Shirkers is an incomplete film because after shooting was finished the director, Georges Cardona, took the recordings and refused anyone else access to them. The theft meant that Shirkers could never be fully produced and released as a complete feature film. Georges was involved in Shirkers because he taught the film course on which Sophia, Sandi, and Jasmine were enrolled.

The footage of Shirkers – but crucially not the sound recordings – was eventually recovered decades later. The recovery took place when, after Georges’ death, his ex-wife found and entrusted the film reels back to Sandi, Jasmine, and Sophia.

Sandi Tan tells that story in her excellent 2018 documentary, which is also called Shirkers and is available on Netflix. It contains lots of footage from the original film (which Sophia calls Shirkers 1.0), and features Sophia talking about her experiences of creating it.

As Sophia explains in our interview, taking part in the Shirkers documentary (which she refers to as Shirkers 2.0) has allowed her to access whole new ways of thinking about incomplete things, to use exciting experimental forms in her academic work, and to enjoy different, delightful approaches to living creatively.

Sophia tells me about the variety of emotions and youthful confidence involved in making Shirkers 1.0; about the vulnerability she experienced when watching Shirkers 2.0; about how her experiences with Georges prepared her for working with difficult people later in her career; about the impact of the Shirkers film on how scholars can think about films that are incomplete or no longer exist; and about the importance of staying for the credits when you go to the cinema.

Links of interest:

Sophia: https://www.vassar.edu/faculty/soharvey

Shirkers: https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80241061

Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished BBC Film, edited by Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/incomplete/paper

Giselle Buchanan: http://www.gisellebuchanan.com/about-1 

Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity: https://www.dukeupress.edu/uplift-cinema

unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, works in progress, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the ⁠artwork is by Graham Oakes⁠. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com,